Downtown Miami

Miami Art Museum

If there were a poster child for the current melding of design and art in Miami, it would have to be Terence Riley, the new director of the Miami Art Museum (MAM) and former Philip Johnson chief curator of architecture and design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where he oversaw the epic $858 million recasting of the building by Yoshio Taniguchi. To jump-start the buzz about the MAM of the future, Riley, a steadfastly modern architect himself, brought in two design celebrities: the Pritzker Prize–winning, Basel, Switzerland–based If there were a poster child for the current melding of design and art in Miami, it would have to be Terence Riley, the new director of the Miami Art Museum (MAM) and former Philip Johnson chief curator of architecture and design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where he oversaw the epic $858 million recasting of the building by Yoshio Taniguchi. To jump-start the buzz about the MAM of the future, Riley, a steadfastly modern architect himself, brought in two design celebrities: the Pritzker Prize–winning, Basel, Switzerland–based team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, to turn the 29 acres of downtown’s Bicentennial Park into the Museum Park complex, due in 2010, centering on MAM and the Miami Museum of Science and Planetarium.